Forward Deploy Engineer

About the role

Role Overview

Bucket Robotics is hiring a Forward Deploy Engineer to work at the boundary between our core engineering team and real manufacturing deployments. You’ll spend most of your time in San Francisco building alongside our engineers—but regularly travel to customer sites across the U.S. to deploy, debug, and harden our system in real production environments.

This role is ideal for an engineer who wants to see their work leave the laptop and show up on factory floors—integrating cameras, models, and workflows with real constraints, real operators, and real uptime requirements.

Responsibilities

- Deploy Bucket’s vision systems at customer manufacturing sites

- Work directly with customers during onboarding, pilots, and early production runs

- Integrate cameras, edge devices, and models into real production workflows

- Debug issues spanning software, ML models, hardware, lighting, and environment

- Serve as the technical owner for in-field issues from discovery through resolution

- Collaborate closely with the core engineering team to reproduce issues and ship fixes

- Translate real-world deployment pain points into actionable product and platform improvements

- Build deployment playbooks, checklists, and internal tooling to make future rollouts faster and more reliable

- Support technical evaluations alongside sales and leadership without being a sales role

- This role will require travel for up to 30% of the time. You’ll be hands-on helping customers use our technology, and when in SF building alongside the rest f our engineering team.

Required Qualifications

- 2+ years experience in software engineering, robotics, systems, or field-facing engineering roles

- Strong programming skills in Python

- Comfortable debugging complex systems across hardware and software boundaries

- Experience working directly with customers in technical environments

- Enjoys wearing many hats and operating in fast-moving, ambiguous situations

- Willingness to travel ~30% of the time to customer sites across the U.S.

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience deploying or supporting ML or computer vision systems in production

- Familiarity with cameras, edge devices, or embedded systems

- Background in robotics, manufacturing, automation, or industrial environments

- Experience with Linux-based systems and on-prem or edge deployments

- Previous startup or early-stage company experience

What We Offer

- Competitive salary & meaningful equity – help shape how our technology works in the real world

- Comprehensive benefits – health, dental, and vision insurance

- Professional development budget – conferences, courses, and skills growth